Plugin pipeline

The plugin step nobody reviewed

August 14, 2026

A pull request can be read line by line and still tell you nothing about when the code in it runs. The stage, the mode, the filtering attributes and the columns on the pre-image are rows in an environment, changed through a registration tool by whoever had the credentials that afternoon. Nothing in the diff moves when they change, and nothing in the build fails.

So the review is happening on half the artifact. The C# in front of the reviewer is the half that version control can see; the half that decides whether it runs at all on update, after the database commits, with the old value of one column in hand, is sitting in SdkMessageProcessingStep rows nobody opened.

The shortest path to a reviewable registration is to stop keeping it somewhere a diff cannot reach — read it back out of the environment and write it into the file the reviewer already has open, as [Plugin], [Step] and [Image] attributes. Then the two halves move together, and a change to either one shows up in the same pull request.

We wrote Plugin Step Codegen to do that.

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